This conference focuses on how Scotland can tackle the current challenges in the integration of health and social care and meet our wider health care reform needs reflected in those challenges. It discusses re-balancing the current primacy of hospital based services with the development of a more fit for purpose health care structure, encompassing primary and community based care and meeting the growing demand for management of longer term conditions.

Jeanne Freeman MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport, Scottish Government said in the Parliamentary debate on the Programme for Government 2018-19 that:

"We are building on the work of recent years.......work that drives our integration of health and social care to bring the right care to people in the right setting." 6th September 2018

The drive to deliver integrated health and social care reflects broader challenges in transforming Scottish health care. Health strategy has, for decades, been filtered through the prism of hospitals and hospital based services but, as Scotland heads towards 2020, a new approach is needed to address contemporary long term illnesses, care needs and living choices.

The current model, for example, sees delayed discharges driven both by admissions which could be avoided and a lack of suitable discharge destinations. This is neither efficient nor working in the best interest of patients. Increasingly we need to find effective non-hospital options for patient care against the backdrop of living in a society where families are less able and available to provide non service-based care.

Integration is a model which can potentially address much of this challenge, both in health and social care itself, and more broadly for other health services. However the problem areas faced by health and social care integration and identified by Audit Scotland - leadership, strategic planning, finances and financial planning, governance and accountability, information sharing and meaningful engagement - are ones which must also be solved if we are to be successful in re-engineering health care across the NHS to meet contemporary needs.

How then can we create new ways to deliver health care options, confront the organisational and structural challenges so that delivery is led by need, and reshape the way in which health structures and practices work to achieve the Cabinet Secretary's aim to deliver the right care to people in the right setting?

This conference will take place in three sessions:

Understanding the current strategic picture on health

Treating health with radical thinking

Rethinking and rebalancing health: Getting from services to care

It will provide a platform to discuss a range of themes including:

Health and social care now: A microcosm of NHS potential reform

Sharing what we know about a possible health system for Scotland

Why structures matter: Boards, local services and integration

Lessons from abroad: Big lessons from small nations?

Bringing digital transformation into health care

Rethinking and rebalancing health: Getting from services to care

Focusing on prevention, Primary Care and condition management

Who Should Attend?

This conference will be relevant for everyone working in Scotland's NHS and all related services, particularly planners, managers and directors in Primary, Secondary, acute, community, social care, local, general and teaching hospital environments - and all participants in the strategic planning, development & delivery of Scotland's health services.

It will also be relevant for patients and patient representative groups, clinicians, professional bodies, allied health professionals, trade unions, health related academics, suppliers to the NHS and partners in NHS service delivery - particularly pharmaceutical and health related digital service organisations - and, more generally,all public sector bodies and individuals with roles in health promotion, provision of services to older people and people living with long term conditions. This includes those delivering social care, all public sector bodies with health interests and responsibilities, private companies with engagement in the health system supply chain, strategic bodies with an interest in promoting health, third & community sector organisations and all agencies and departments supporting preventative health initiatives.